They also believe you can produce the same
effect by spinning
the written form of the mantra around in a prayer wheel (called "Mani
wheels" by the Tibetans). The effect is said to be multiplied when more
copies of the mantra are included, and spinning the Mani
wheels faster increases the benefit as well.

Unless you are already familiar with Tibetan
Buddhist
prayer wheels, we'd like to suggest that before reading more of this
page,
you look at Dharma Haven's main page on Mani
wheels:

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama,
has said that
having the mantra on your computer works the same as a traditional Mani
wheel. As the digital image spins around on your hard drive, it sends
the
peaceful prayer of compassion to all directions and purifies the
area.

Animated images like this one are
digital Mani
wheels which can be placed on Web pages. Similar animated graphics can
be used for Mani-wheel
screen savers.

This page offers information on how to install
several
types of digital prayer wheels on your computer:

My current favorite among
the digital prayer wheels I've tested is a small video that just sits
on my screen, spinning happily while I work. It's there right now, up
in one corner. It looks like this:

One of our visitors extracted the individual pictures
from this animated GIF prayer wheel and created a Quick Time Movie,
with a Mantra sound track. He made it for his Mac, but it
should work with any
computer with Apple's QuickTime 7 installed.

Once downloaded just double click on the file icon and it will
start
spinning and playing the Mantra. I like it best with
the display size
(under the "View" menu) set to "Half Size" and with the
"playback speed" control set to about 1.7. The Volume can
be controlled from the
QT player menu bar, select Windows, select Show A/V controls and the
slider control dialog should appear.

Here's a digital prayer
wheel that you turn yourself, using your mouse. It looks like this, but
much larger:

On my system it fills the screen. The are available
for both Macintosh and Windows systems.

You turn the wheels by 'grabbing' them, holding down the left mouse
button and moving the mouse quickly from right to left across the face
of the wheel you want to spin. You can also turn them all at once, by
starting on the right side of the rightmost wheel and sweeping the
mouse to the left across all three wheels. They will turn the other
way, too, but prayer wheels are normally spun clockwise (as viewed from
above).

The program also plays peaceful oriental-sounding
music.

The prayer wheels, called 'prayer mills,' can be downloaded from a Web
site in France:

Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani
wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra "Om Mani Padme
Hum"
on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache
for
your browser.

"To set your very own prayer wheel in motion,
all you
have to do is download this mantra to your computer's hard disk. Once
downloaded,
your hard disk drive will spin the mantra for you. Nowadays hard disk
drives
spin their disks somewhere between 3600 and 7200 revolutions per
minute,
with a typical rate of 5400 rpm. Given those rotation speeds, you'll
soon
be purifying loads of negative karma."

She suggests that you simply save the text "OM
MANI PADME
HUM," or use the Tibetan characters, which you can save by clicking on
the image below, and then selecting the "Save As" option from the
"File"
menu in your browser:

If you use the default filename for the image
file, om-mani-padma-hum.gif, you'll be storing the mantra twice.

If you like, you can enhance potency of your
hard drive
prayer wheel by including a lot of copies of the mantra, or by includingimages of Chenrezig, images of Tibetan Buddhist
lamas,
images of people using Mani
wheels, and texts explaining the meaning of the mantra, or the Mahayana
Buddhist teachings on compassion as the key to enlightenment. You can
find
plenty of ideas, images and relevant text passages on these pages:

Deb Platt concludes her page with this
suggestion: "P.S.
It wouldn't hurt to think of the mantra from time to time while it's
spinning
around on your disk drive." We'd like to add another note, which is
that
it wouldn't hurt to remember once in a while why so many Tibetan
Buddhist's
spend so much time spinning Mani
wheels. This article is a good source:

When
an animated GIF file is included in a web page, the animation occurs
automatically.
When you find one you like on the Web, you can save it by
right-clicking
on the image and then using the "Save Image As" or "Save Picture As"
option.

Animated GIFs take a while to load, but once a
particular
image file is loaded, all the copies of that image on your page will be
visible at once.

What's not always so easy is to get permission
to use
a particular image on your pages -- but the Mani
wheels we've included here on this page may be used for any respectful
purpose. See Image Credits for details.

When you download the
Java class Rotator.class
the name may get set to Rotator.exe. Change the name
back
to Rotator.class or the applet won't work.

Om
Mani Padme Hum

Javascript Mani Scrolls

If JavaScript is enabled on your browser, you
can see a scrolling banner with the mantra OM
MANI PADME HUNG at the bottom of this page, in
the status window of your
browser. It is
generated by a small JavaScript program which is part of the HTML code
that
tells the browser how to display this page.

When a page containing that script is loaded
in a Javascript-enabled
browser, the mantra will be automatically scrolled in the status bar
whenever
that part of the page is visible on the screen. The browser does not
have
to be the active task (you can be working on something else), and the
computer
does not have to be connected to the internet.

Instructions for adding the Javascript Mani
scroll to
a Web page are given in the Technical
Details
section at the end of this document.

For the download, we've changed the file
extension from
".wav" to".exe" so that your browser will let you download it. When you
store it on your hard drive, you should change the file extension back
to ".wav," i.e., Rename "om-mani-padme-hung.exe" to
"om-mani-padme-hung.wav."
(If your computer cannot play windows .wav files, you'll have to
convert
the file in order to actually hear it.)

How to Add the Javascript Mani Scroll
to a Web
Page

You can get the program by clicking on
"Source" or "Document
Source" on the "View" menu of your Web browser. Copy and paste the
program
into the HTML code for your page.

Copy the HTML code from the line that opens the
Javascript section:

<script
language="JavaScript">

through the line that closes it:

</script>

and paste it into your document at the end of the
<head> section, right
before the tag that ends the head section:

</head>

More Animated GIF Images

This is the first Mani
wheel we found that could be displayed on a Web page. It came from a
Japanese
Web site. The authors wanted the prayer wheel to be used freely on the
Web.

The top and bottom borders of this image look a
little better
against black or dark background. Here we've used a dark background in
a table cell, but it would work just as well on a dark page background.

When you click on the link "DOWNLOAD
MANI WHEEL" your computer will ask you where you want to put the
file.
(If the first question is "What would you like to do with this file?"
answer
"Save it to disk.") It is easier to work with a newly downloaded
program
in a directory (folder) that contains no other files. You can use your
"Temp" directory (you may have to empty it first), or create a new one.
I use C:\mani

When you give the "O.K." the computers will
move a copy
of the file from our server to your machine. The download is very quick
-- the file is only 40k bytes. Now look at that directory (using
Windows
Explorer or File Manager) to see what you've got.

Got it! Now What?

The file manizip.exe is a
self-extracting archive
file -- you run the program to automatically extract the files it
contains.
Then set up some way to make it easy to start the program. You can then
use it as a manually initiated screen saver, or just look at the
spinning
colors when you want to relax.

Windows 95: To extract the files use
the "Run"
command on the "Start" menu. Click "Start" and select "Run..."
at the bottom of the list. In the "Run..." window enter the
command
line, e.g. C:\mani\manizip.exe (or select "Browse"
(lower
right), open the folder where you put the manizip.exe file, and
open that file). Then click "OK". A DOS window will open,
with the message "Continue extraction?" Press "Y" for "yes" and
"Enter." When the DOS window says "Finished - Manizip" at the
top,
close the DOS window.

Now create a shortcut for starting the prayer
wheel: in
Windows Explorer, use the right mouse button to click on the program
file manib.exe.
Choose "Create Shortcut." Rename the shortcut to something simple, like
"Wheel," and copy it to the desktop. (I use it so often that I have it
on the "Start" menu -- just copy the shortcut to the "Start Menu"
folder
in the Windows directory.)

To stop the program temporarily, press
[Alt][Space] and
click anywhere on the screen (except the menu) to close the menu. To
really
terminate the program, choose "Close" from the [Alt][Space] menu, and
reassure
Windows that, yes, you really do want to close the program. Or press
escape
[Esc] and close the DOS window.

You can prevent your automatic screen saver
from taking
over while the prayer wheel is running: Right-click on the shortcut,
and
choose "Properties" at the bottom of the list of options. In the
"Properties"
dialog box click the "Misc" tab, and remove the checkmark for "allow
screen
saver" and then click "Close."

We are interested in finding an automatic Mani
Wheel screen
saver, but there is a certain merit to be had by intentionally starting
the wheel. Try to really connect with the mantra and everything you
know
about what it means, or connect to your true good wishes for all beings
(including yourself), just for a moment when you start up the Mani
Wheel.
You may be surprised by what a difference it makes!

Windows 3.1: Run the program to
automatically extract
and decompress the files. One way is to File Manager to open the folder
containing the manizip.exe file, and double-click on the file.
(Another
way is to use the "Run" command on the "File" menu).

Manib.exe is the program file. Double
click it
to start the program. Escape [Esc] to exit.

Now create an easy way to start the prayer
wheel:

Method 1. Call up the Task Manager
([Ctrl][Esc]). Click
on an unassigned button. Assign the manib.exe file to that
button.

Method 2: If you normally work out of the
Program Manager,
create a program icon for the Mani Wheel and put it in a Program Group
that you normally leave open. Click on the "DOS Prompt" icon in "Main."
Open the "File" menu and select "Copy." Choose the folder (directory)
where
you want the new icon to reside and click "OK." Now click on the new
icon,
open the "File" menu, and select "Properties." Change the command line
to "manib.exe" and the Working Directory the directory containing the
Mani
Wheel files. Give the new program item a name that you will recognize,
like "Wheel" or "Prayer Wheel" or "Mani, and click "OK."

The program runs in a DOS session, which must be
in full
screen mode for the prayer wheel to function correctly.

To end the program, press escape [Esc] and
close the DOS
session.

DOS: The MANIB.EXE
file and the VDSCM19.RLE
files must reside in the same directory. I would put a batch file ("WHEEL.BAT"?)
for starting the program into some directory on the PATH.

Don't run the MANI.BAT file
from the zip
package unless you want both the MANIZIP file and the README
file deleted. I would delete the MANI.BAT file instead.